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Legal

Last week, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced that it has launched an investigation into influencers who fail to disclose that they were compensated to post content on behalf of brands.

“Social media stars can have a big influence on what their followers do and buy. If people see clothes, cosmetics, a car, or a holiday being plugged by someone they admire, they might be swayed into buying it,” George Lusty, the CMA’s Senior Director for Consumer Protection, stated. “So, it’s really important they are clearly told whether a celebrity is promoting a product because they have bought it themselves, or because they have been paid or thanked in some way by the brand.”

Ad fraud, in all of its many forms, is one of the biggest threats to the digital ad industry – and perhaps its biggest.

By the most pessimistic of estimates, advertisers are losing upwards of a third of their digital ad spend to fraud despite the fact that all the major players in the industry have been trying to stamp it out for years.

On Thursday, the US Thursday Supreme Court issued a decision in a closely-watched case that overturned a prior ruling that online retailers have relied on to avoid collecting sales tax on online purchases.

After months of anticipation and preparation, on Friday, the GDPR went into effect and privacy advocates, eager to put the law to the test, wasted no time challenging the practices of the internet’s two biggest names.

Hours after the GDPR became the law of the land, a non-profit organization called None Of Your Business (NOYB) lodged complaints against Google and Facebook, including Facebook subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp, with four different European authorities.

On Monday, the US Supreme Court struck down a federal law that had banned betting on sports events in every state except Nevada. As six of the nine Supreme Court justices saw it, the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sport Protection Act, or PASPA, was unconstitutional.

The GDPR goes into effect in less than two weeks and while many companies are focused on executing their compliance strategies, it’s not too early to start thinking about the future of data in a post-GDPR world.

Here are how first, second and third-party data will likely be affected by the game-changing regulation.

The GDPR goes into effect later this month and GDPR compliance efforts are well underway. For example, users of online services around the world are receiving notifications of updated terms of service and privacy policies.

Some of the updates contained in these agreements are significant. Facebook-owned WhatsApp, for instance, has increased its minimum age to 16. Snapchat isn’t abandoning users under 16, but it is changing how some of its features work for its under-16 userbase.

In response to the ongoing scandal over its data collection, usage and sharing policies, Facebook has announced a slew of its changes to the Facebook and Instagram APIs. These APIs, or application programming interfaces, allow third parties to build applications that interact with Facebook and Instagram.

The changes have the potential to affect a number of players that participate in the Facebook and Instagram ecosystems, including brands.